Sometimes, the upkeep of artwork has serendipitous side benefits. At the Morgan Library, the temporary unbinding of the manuscript “Le Livre de la Chasse” for conservation purposes has occasioned a unique treat: an installation displaying most of its 87 remarkable miniatures. Produced around 1407 by unknown scribes and illuminators, the Morgan manuscript illustrates the hunting treatise written by Gaston Phoebus for his friend and fellow hunter Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy. Forty-six manuscripts and numerous printed editions of this text survive today — testimony to the important role of the hunt among medieval nobility — and, of these, the Morgan’s is considered one of the very finest. One can see why; arranged around the perimeter of the second-floor gallery, the nearly 50 miniatures delight with their luminous intimacy. (All the manuscript’s leaves are displayed in order, but many of the 87 illuminations lie hidden on their reverse sides.) Rounding out the elegant installation are some two dozen other texts on hunting themes, dating from the 11th through 16th centuries.

Phoebus appears to have been no blushing violet. According to the wall text, he claimed three great pleasures in life — hunting, weaponry, and love — and allegedly excelled most at the first. The author portrait (the traditional prologue to medieval manuscripts) pictures him on an elaborate throne surrounded by hunters and dogs. In the final illumination of the manuscript, a small Christ figure blesses the kneeling Phoebus; in the text, the author thanks the Lord for not delivering him to the devil, “like an animal captured by a hunter.” These two images bracket the sequence of illuminations, which Phoebus helpfully arranged in four categories: the habits of various animals, the care of dogs, hunting strategies, and the uses of traps and snares.

The illuminations alternately awe and charm. Each page is a tour de force of bright precision, with a single, vibrant miniature above the handwritten text, a large decorative initial, and intricate floral decoration in the left margin. The small, surprisingly varied images boast an expansive range of color, with rich hues — bits of blue, warm red, and yellow-green, adroitly spaced by lighter and darker notes — often set against cool green backgrounds. In these settings, trees glow as discrete spiky or feathery growths, while the occasional rock sports the fanciful swirls of soft ice cream. Perspective is skewed, when attempted at all, but man and beast alike are modeled with wondrous attention (if sometimes naïve proportions), down to details of teeth, hair, and toes. Except for rare instances of sky, meticulous patterns, often in gold leaf, fill in above the high horizon lines.

Extensive wall texts convey Phoebus’s eagerness to instruct. He demonstrates an impressive expertise about coordinating the hunting of every animal from reindeer to boar and otter. Dogs and humans have their various roles, according to experience and stature. Each hunted beast requires special tactics; in the case of a rabbit lodged in its burrow, a hunter inserts a muzzled ferret or a smoke bomb. Despite his encyclopedic knowledge, Phoebus at points seems woefully naïve (bear cubs are stillborn, but licked to life by their mothers) or simply tetchy: Setting traps is an ignoble method best suited to elderly hunters.

The charm of these works, though, lies first of all in the vitality of the illuminators’ observations. Many of the images amount to lessons in natural science, depicting the family life of creatures who variously nurse, frolic, and suckle. The leaf titled “Caring for Hounds” conveys the tenderness with which kennel men examine dogs’ eyes and paws. On another page, bears tend to their own needs; two cubs playfully pat the back of an adult bear roughhousing with another. (Or possibly the adult is committing another act: Phoebus notes that “when the bear has his way with the she bear, they do it like man and woman.” ) On the “Wildcats” leaf, a lynx — evenly peppered with spots, like a ceramic toy — scampers up a tree, pursued by a gray cat. Another feline shows off its field-mouse dinner, while four baby lynx peer from a cave.

Violent imagery appears, too, in miniatures such as “The Wolf,” in which a pack of these fearsome animals devours a torn-apart sheep. Numerous hunting scenes depict animals impaled by spears and arrows; “Undoing and Breaking Up of a Hart” features, with the usual delicacy of detail, a dog sampling the stag’s severed head. In these seductive, gleaming scenes, however, the protocols of hunting seem simply the extension of nature’s hierarchies, in awhich everything has its appointed fate.

The exhibition includes a number of other manuscripts that explicitly evoke the moral and social implications of the hunt. One favorite theme is the inversion of hunter and prey; “A Book of Hours from the southern Netherlands” (c. 1500), for instance, depicts three princes returning from the hunt, only to be pursued in turn by a trio of skeletons. The margins of a page in a French psalter-hours (ca. 1280-90) show a rabbit blowing a horn, a dog attacking a man, and a fisherman with a scaly, forked tail pulling a fish from the sea. Elsewhere, a British treatise on hawking (1496) reaffirms the social order, preserving the expensive pastime of falconry for nobility; this text ranks birds from the tercel (appropriate for the poor) to the eagle (suitable for emperors). Several striking Islamic and Indian images of hunting scenes, dating from the 16th through 19th centuries, similarly depict the hunt as a royal diversion.

“Le Livre de la Chasse” boasts quite a provenance. As the wall text explains, it probably belonged in the 15th century to Francis II, Duke of Brittany, who added his own coat of arms to the page with the author’s prologue. At a later point, it fell into the possession of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, who appended to it their own, remarkable, full-page coat of arms. (This impressively decorated sheet introduces the exhibition.) It later passed through the hands of the Duke of Marlborough and various breeders of dogs and horses — none of whom added further coats of arms — before the Morgan acquired it in 1983.

Few will ever have the pleasure of owning such a remarkable manuscript, but the installation provides the next best thing. The unsbinding has enabled the scanning of the individual leaves, and the production of an edition of bound facsimiles, one of which lies open on a desk. Museumgoers can turn the pages at will to see the images on the reverse sides of the originals. The quality of the reproductions is very high indeed, and judging from the browned page corners, many have taken the pleasure.

Until August 10 (225 Madison Ave. at 36th Street, 212-685-0008).